We explore the formal foundations of recent studies comparing aural pattern recognition capabilities of populations of human and non-human animals. To date, these experiments have focused on the boundary between the Regular and Context-Free stringsets. We argue that experiments directed at distinguishing capabilities with respect to the Subregular Hierarchy, which subdivides the class of Regular stringsets, are likely to provide better evidence about the distinctions between the cognitive mechanisms of humans and those of other species. Moreover, the classes of (...) the Subregular Hierarchy have the advantage of fully abstract descriptive (model-theoretic) characterizations in addition to characterizations in more familiar grammar- and automata-theoretic terms. Because the descriptive characterizations make no assumptions about implementation, they provide a sound basis for drawing conclusions about potential cognitive mechanisms from the experimental results. We review the Subregular Hierarchy and provide a concrete set of principles for the design and interpretation of these experiments. (shrink)

Surprising artistic interventions in the landscape of the public everyday are psychologically, socially, and politically beneficial to individuals as well as their communities. Such interventions enable their audiences to access moments of surprising inspiration, self-reflection, and revitalization. These spontaneous moments may offer access to the experience of distance from the rational “self,” allowing the irrational and purely emotive that resides within all of us to assert itself. It is this sensual instinct that all we too frequently push aside, particularly in (...) the public realm, for the sake of our responsibilities. Urban communities in particular are persistently accosted by visual and aural advertisements and consumerist lures, that further discourage individuals from accessing their non-rational selves. Yet, I argue that it would improve the health and vibrancy of our communal lives if we encountered among others in public, even for a moment, the strong feelings of sudden elation or confusion that we generally consider to be private. I also argue that an addition could be made to the already diverse oeuvre of artistic approaches that comprise the realm of “sound art” and that it may be termed “musical intervention art” – or, simply put, music played in a circumscribed area in the form of an outdoor installation, that is designed to accost, surprise, overwhelm, and through this, actively engage. This article will describe an imaginary example of musical installation art. (shrink)

The visual arts include painting, sculpture, photography, video, and film. But many people would argue that music is the universal or only art of sound. In the modernist era, Western art music has incorporated unpitched sounds or ‘noise’, and I pursue the question of whether this process allows space for a non-musical soundart. Are there non-musical arts of sound—is there an art phonography, for instance, to parallel art photography? At the same time, I attempt a characterization of music, contrasting acoustic, (...) aesthetic, and acousmatic accounts. My view is that there is some truth in all of these. I defend the claim that music is an art with a small ‘a’—a practice involving skill or craft whose ends are essentially aesthetic, that especially rewards aesthetic attention—whose material is sounds exhibiting tonal organization. But acoustic and acousmatic accounts help to distinguish between music and non-musical soundart, since music must have a preponderance of tones for its material. (shrink)

The relationship between opera and gay subcultures , lifestyle practices and consumerism has been noted by cultural critics and musicologists - the former in affirmative terms, the latter largely hostile. This article explores this relationship initially through a review of the existing literature before concentrating on the striking affinities in the discursive construction of both cultural forms. In the modern era, both opera and homosexuality have been stigmatized and marginalized in their respective rationalizing ‘scientific’ domains: musicology and sexology. Both have (...) been authoritatively declared unhealthy, both reconstructed out of the distinctive repressions of Victorianism, both subsequently searching for inclusion and legitimacy. (shrink)

"The essence of literature may be compared to the various plants and trees," Liu Hseih writes, "alike in the fact that they are rooted in the soil, yet different in their flavor and their fragrance, their exposure to the sun."1 The character of each work is manifest in its unique savor and in its scent. In other works, the uniqueness of a work can be savored: texts may echo other works, but the personality of any work is instantaneously verified by (...) what Liu Hseih calls wei, flavor, and hsiu, fragrance. It is this uniqueness that persists and survives innumerable bad imitations, shifts in circumstances, lost phonetics, and changing styles. It is what remains fresh in the classics and enables the contemporary reader to feel a sense of discovery and newness. Liu Hseih says that of these lasting works that their "roots are deep, their foliage luxuriant, their expression succinct yet rich; the things described were familiar, but their ramifications are far-reaching: so, although they were written in the past, they have a lasting savor that remains fresh."2 · 1. Liu Hseih, Wen-hsin tiao-lung chu, ed. Fan Wen-lan , p. 519; Shih, The Literary Mind and the Carving of the Dragons , p. 232.· 2. Liu Hseih, p. 22; Shih, p. 24. Although the same Chinese word wei is used in this passage, I have translated it as "savor" to stress the combination of qualities inherent in a work rather than restrict these qualities to a single "flavor." Eugene Eoyang is an associate professor of comparative literature and of East Asian languages and literatures at Indiana State University. He has contributed over fifty translations to Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry and is the author of an anthology of Chinese fiction, Links in the Chain. (shrink)

This essay examines the problem of medial specificity in music and sound art, giving particular attention to Seth Kim-Cohen’s call for a non-cochlear sound art based on the notion of “expansion” that has been decisive in visual arts discourses. I argue that Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear intervention in In the Blink of an Ear might be productively pressured towards the concept of a “sonic effect” that acknowledges the material-discursive particularity of sound without recourse to the phenomenological claims of authenticity that Kim-Cohen correctly (...) abhors. In service of this argument, the essay extensively discusses a sound and media artwork – Exurbia, created by myself and William Brent – that leverages the metaphorics of sound against existing understandings of specific forms of network communication. I argue that the conceptual and material dimensions of the project stridulate in a hum of recursive vectors for considering the constitution and consequences of networked aural interaction. Exurbia can thus be parsed in terms of medial specificity precisely because its digital aural materials are themselves discursive. (shrink)

Using Jean-Luc Nancy's productive concept of resonant listening, this article interrogates silence in the films of Michael Haneke. Arguing for a kind of open, resonating and sonorous form of philosophic listening, Nancy articulates the distinctions among listening, hearing and understanding. Working from these concepts, this article considers the particular form of resonance in the instance of cinematic silence and in particular the use of silence in the philosophically engaged cinema of Haneke.

Roger Penrose, in _The Emperor's New Mind_ (1989), writes about the way Mozart perceived music. Mozart did not play a piece in his mind in real time, or even speeded up, but could hold it before him all at once. We all do this, although usually for much shorter riffs than entire symphonies. I have argued that the all-at-onceness of our thoughts and perceptions is at least as inexplicable as what it is like to see red; I think the (...) class='Hi'>aural/temporal all-at-onceness makes the point at least as vividly as the visual/spatial all-at-onceness of the curl of smoke in an art nouveau poster. (shrink)

In Polanyian Meditations: In Search of a Post-Critical Logic, Poteat draws upon Polanyi to explicate what he calls an “oral/aural logic,” which he thinks informs Polanyi’s thought and which is different from the conventional “visual logic” of the Western philosophical tradition, and then argues that this oral/aural logic is implied in the Hebraic understanding of reality. This idea is a key to understanding the genesis of the modern worldview, which can be conceptualized as involving certain elements of the (...) Hebraic worldview distorted byan excessively visual orientation. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to integrate two outstanding problems within the philosophy of science. The first concerns what role aesthetics plays in scientific thinking. The second is the problem of how logically testable ideas are generated (the so-called "psychology of research" versus "logic of (dis)proof" problem). I argue that aesthetic sensibility is the basis for what scientists often call intuition, and that intuition in turn embodies (in a literal physiological sense) ways of thinking that have their own meta-logic. (...) Thus, aesthetics is a form of cognition. Scientists think not in equations or words or other logical abstractions, but emotionally and sensually, using visual and aural images, kinesthetic and other proprioceptive feelings, sensations, patterns, and analogies. These aesthetic forms of thinking have their own logics that I call "synosia", from the root words synaesthesia (a combining of senses) and gnosis, "to know". Synosia denotes understanding that integrates feeling that one knows with feeling what one knows. Eminent scientists universally describe an explicitly secondary process in which such personal knowledge must be "translated" into a formal language, such as words or equations, in order to be communicated to other people. Many of the unsolved problems that philosophers of science (as well as psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers) have had in making sense of scientific thinking have arisen from confusing the form and content of the final translations with the hidden means by which scientific insights are actually achieved. (shrink)

Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed (...) to identify further points of structural isomorphism (a) between the experience of seeing a scarlet red and of hearing a trumpet blare and (b) between the qualities of those experiences. Lastly, I gesture towards how these distinctions can be an aid in describing what it is like to be a bat. (shrink)

Drawing from ethnographic, empirical, and historical/cultural perspectives, we examine the extent to which visual aspects of music contribute to the communication that takes place between performers and their listeners. First, we introduce a framework for understanding how media and genres shape aural and visual experiences of music. Second, we present case studies of two performances, and describe the relation between visual and aural aspects of performance. Third, we report empirical evidence that visual aspects of performance reliably influence perceptions (...) of musical structure (pitch related features) and affective interpretations of music. Finally, we trace new and old media trajectories of aural and visual dimensions of music, and highlight how our conceptions, perceptions and appreciation of music are intertwined with technological innovation and media deployment strategies. (shrink)

The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The properties of secondary qualities have recently become an object of interest again in analytic philosophy; it is generally assumed that secondary qualities - in the mind at least - tend to be irreducible to the physical: taste, smell, color perception, the aural, & the tactile all seem to be more subjectively perceived than most other qualities. This is shown to present such topics as realism vs anti-realism, description, & truth-value with a series of problems, which are then discussed. (...) The standard literature (S. A. Kripke, D. M. Armstrong, & C. McGinn) is reviewed; it is concluded that, at least for color perception, a dispositional analysis is somewhat satisfactory; secondary qualities are ubiquitous. 7 References. A. Cohen-Siegel. (shrink)

This article discusses Jerrold Levinson's theory of concatenationism, which emphasizes the moment-by-moment character of musical listeners’ basic musical understanding, and the related project of anti-architectonicism, which denies the influence of large-scale music-structural information on basic musical understanding. A reconstruction of Levinson's position reveals him to embrace a qualified architectonicism himself and shows that his remaining anti-architectonicism is afflicted with several problems. While the conceptual distinction Levinson draws between a piece of music and its structure as well as his three “intuitions (...) for concatenationism” all point toward important features of musical understanding, it is argued that none of them supports the anti-architectonicist thesis in the intended manner. Furthermore, the way Levinson relates both musical understanding and musical value to a notion of aural cogency renders it difficult to see how one could understand music that one does not value or value music that one cannot understand. It is argued that the anti-architectonicist focus of Levinson's project, together with the ensuing argumentative problems, follows from methodological commitments that might be overcome within disciplinary frameworks beyond philosophy. Suggestions are given for developing a positive concatenationism both in musicology and in philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 52-59. Introduction Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Adam Staley Groves is a poet of thought. I say this with the greatest sincerity. Hence a thorough reading of even this small selection of his work in the length of an introduction is impossible. Such is the diligent reader’s task! Nevertheless, my choice for Staley Groves, like all choices, demands a justification, which I would like to formulate as follows. Staley Groves fits in the heroic tradition of poets that (...) have engaged philosophy on its own terrain, the surface of being. It is of utmost importance for the circulation and development of philosophy that these poets exist and continue to challenge the assumptions and axioms of philosophy, especially in times in which nearly the whole field of thought has fallen prey to irrelevant scholastic disputes. In his first publication, Imaginality, Conversant and Eschaton , Staley Groves clearly states his intentions when he asks of us to "consider surfaces without metaphyics" (22), "this landscape of surface(s) and concentric perfection, history of scribbles, of scribblers, true tauto-scribes—this flat world of ladders blown up and blown down on." (170). A surface without metaphysics is a thought of being with all the ladders of metaphysics flattened. Just like with Wittgenstein, the reader "must throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it." (§6.54). Staley Groves inserts himself in the tradition of poetry hailed by Wallace Stevens in his essay "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet" as the "unofficial view of being." Unofficial, but no less serious. And just like Stevens, Staley Groves appeals to the idea of imagination as the place from which both poetry and philosophy originate. At the end of the unpublished collection 33 poems from 2008 he says, "Poetry should agitate the imaginary whose foundation is of the nothing apart and conversant with such." Poetry is, contrary to most metaphysical philosophy, non-exclusive and should be able to imagine what or who imagines the "apart," the exclusions of and from language. This should be done by means of, and I really admire this word, an "aesthtic" reasoning. A reasoning that conflates the categories of ethics and esthetics, "That is the overturning of the structure onto violence / into the transmission of imaginary kalidescopically." The following selection of poems has been made from Staley Groves’s upcoming publication of his first collection of poetry, entitled Poetry Vocare . Fortuitously—and Stevens taught us, every true metaphor is fortuitous—the first poem from the section "galata bridge" deals with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. : the "greased isthmus" of the Bosphorus, the locus classicus of the East-West divide, a "night’s milk water / between 'worlds.'" Again we encounter Staley Groves’s theme of the "nothing apart" of poetry’s imagination when he concludes that "only aura / only aural sun, / of world / no walls remain / the modern kaleidoscope, crushed in stanbul." The Galata Bridge, connecting the ancient and modern parts of Istanbul, crossing the isthmus between Ottoman Byzantium with the Christian world of merchants, here becomes emblematic of one of the many tasks of poetry. In a broader political perspective: the overcoming of all the real and fantasmatic walls dividing so-called terrorists from enlightened humans, dividing god-sent settlers from invaders, dividing desperate people from luxury swimming pools. This can be done, for in a section from "glass language" he assures us that "Walls hold aspiration." And "gusting plaster wall, hear crumbles, between slats, / crumbs between walls. / Sense prints vacant space." Therefore, Staley Groves is most of all an affirmative poet. A poet who affirms the imaginative power of poetry. "allspeed! back into essence," the first poem from "galata bridge" ends. This is an appeal that speaks to us from within poetry. It is an appeal to "town squares, / integrate circles." Prishtinë, Kosovo October 14, 2010 Staley Groves’s Poetry Vocare will be available from March, 2011 as the first publication of Uitgeverij . Selected Poems from Poetry Vocare Adam Staley Groves from GALATA BRIDGE (in the world alive life in the world) plying wall in summer of “world” sea borne holes, a great catastrophe open your wall have it open, do not withhold Mehmed, Mehmed: stands in steel against the slit Bosporus a globe, at his feet against, facing he’s fac?’d-up, to a murk of, constelling waters, leaky, greased isthmus, open pagination a night’s milk water between "worlds" cisternal nectar, lispy pages bound spine of the wall, brok’d flow peering-in plied fibers in its flex, over ages a crown on hill skull hill of skies in thou , sands drown in fervor move , ment mean unbracketed leaves fallen plans from skies no walls remain, leaves us Now, as it were the fire on skull, only aura, only aural sun, of world no walls remain the modern kaleidoscope, crushed in stanbul allspeed! back into essence. from GLASS LANGUAGE The air fills with glass shreds the lungs. see more closely what designs ‘view’. Not aspect, mere aspection, rationing sight. worm aurora rings fiber, glass fire halo of the philosopher, stealing up shoes, to journey, and meet poet’s wife’s husband put on your hat, lift up your coat, hear the hook bounce gusting plaster wall, hear crumbles, between slats, crumbs between walls. Sense prints vacant space. Walls hold aspiration. Citations of poetry, sensible wall, cited by hanging pictures. hung pictures behind evenings. Philosophers are sperm, poetry erupts sperm and dribbles, philosopher recodes term, to terminate, poet, glass text, ure language, insubstantial aspect love vis-able termination. A glass supposes something dramatic about others: finite torsion of onlooker, seeing their reflection seeing beyond, contorted. And as a circle, circumference, a tower, for the master, for the captured, for the thinker, for the clouds. It was philosopher, whom philosopher picks up, who takes a view of the glass, there: a fly in the glass, that can see beyond, cannot escape, overturned glass. A glass language has nothing to do with speaking, rivulet reflections, atomized filling, nostrilling horns, concentric orders and bursting text of lip’s face. It says much about position, of the fly, and the position, of the philosopher. In deed not simple. from POETRY VOCARE poetry is not vocation, mere vocare , the center evacuated. in poetry evacuation, phlebotomy of the plan: evac au tion, to dislocate, correction: evacuation. venesection. venation, vena, to splice center and centers of the central world. the street dispersal, phlebotomy of venations. voidance and evacuation: carefully splice voi and dance ; call-dance, kehy-dance, dence ? poetry means not plans, mere evacuated and beyond call of poetry the evacuation, phlem-botomy of the throwing to the voice in the dispersal of the street. if you are spilt you are split. it is the rising without view for which streets disperse its centers . poetry vocare , plan in,tense futurist claim in,tense, and return to, tense claim of, the call in the collision, thrown phlegm. in the call after call. the splitter and the drinker are in,circled, but we town squares, integrate circles. &nbsp. (shrink)

Argues that rebuilding ethical communities will require a cultural reorientation from visually dominated to oral/aural experience and develops a speech-based conception of moral place that can set limits on the actions of individuals and communities.

The oral/aural power of the Bible has been strangely neglected within the worship life of the church as well as in recent biblical scholarship. In order to recover the Bible's power to take captive the imagination of readers and interpreters, we must once again attend to the public reading, or performance, of the Bible.

This article presents an analysis of visual-acoustic dissonance in Raise The Red Lantern ( Dà Hóng Dēnglóng Gāogāo Guà , Zhang Yimou, 1991). Drawing upon Michel Foucault's discussion of the Panopticon, this study argues that the camera in this film represents a panoptic entity whose subversion can only be achieved by means outside the visual economy. Sound is that means; the aural regime works consistently to unhinge the balance of the optical machinery on both a thematic and cinematographic level. (...) By coding the optical as a totalising and oppressive force, and subverting that force through various forms of visual-acoustic dissonance, Raise The Red Lantern unseats the traditionally dominant camera-image dyad, and presents a powerful rejection of the camera as the only life-giving force in an artistic medium that so privileges the visual. (shrink)

The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the ‘I’ of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancière, Virilio, Ziarek, and Žižek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual (...) cultural education. jagodzinski develops the concept of an ‘avant-garde without authority,’ ‘self-refleXion’ and ‘in(design)’ to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek’s ‘force’ of art. (shrink)

Patient To examine neural responses to aurally-presented sentences, a sparse imaging technique was used to minimize interference from scanner noise. The patient was played a single sentence (or noise-equivalent) in the 7.4s silent period before a single 1.6s scan with stimulus timing jittered relative to scan onset. There were 118 spoken sentences trials, 59 signal correlated noise trials, and an additional 60 silent trials for the purpose of monitoring data quality. The signal correlated noise stimuli had the same duration, spectral (...) profile and amplitude envelope as the original speech, but were entirely unintelligible (S1). The experiment was divided into three sessions of 79 trials with events pseudo-randomly ordered within each scanning session. The sentences were presented using a MRI compatible auditory stimulusdelivery system (Resonance Technology, Northridge, CA), with insert earplugs to further attenuate scanner noise. DMDX software running on a Windows XP PC was used to present the stimulus items. (shrink)

Although individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) typically demonstrate an increased appetitive social drive, their social profile is characterized by dissociations, including socially fearless behavior coupled with anxiousness, and distinct patterns of “peaks and valleys” of ability. The aim of this study was to compare the processing of social and non-social visually and aurally presented affective stimuli, at the levels of behavior and autonomic nervous system (ANS) responsivity, in individuals with WS contrasted with a typically developing (TD) group, with the view (...) of elucidating the highly sociable and emotionally sensitive predisposition noted in WS. Behavioral findings supported previous studies of enhanced competence in processing social over non-social stimuli by individuals with WS; however, the patterns of ANS functioning underlying the behavioral performance revealed a surprising profile previously undocumented in WS. Specifically, increased heart rate (HR) reactivity, and a failure for electrodermal activity (EDA) to habituate were found in individuals with WS contrasted with the TD group, predominantly in response to visual social-affective stimuli. Within the auditory domain, greater arousal linked to variation in heart beat period was observed in relation to music stimuli in individuals with WS. Taken together, the findings suggest that the pattern of ANS response in WS is more complex than previously noted, with increased arousal to face and music stimuli potentially underpinning the heightened behavioral emotionality to such stimuli. The lack of habituation may underlie the increased affiliation and attraction to faces characterizing individuals with WS. Future research directions are suggested. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, Science Studies has produced a fascinating body of literature on visual representation. A crucial part of that literature has explored the materiality of visual representation, primarily the “rendering practices” that make visual representations possible and embody epistemic virtues attached to the scientific self. This essay explores the practices and capacities that support visual representation, but it looks to a seemingly unlikely place for inspiration—the growing literature on the uses of sound in science. My interest here (...) is to see how that literature points us to a view of sound as an epistemic resource that supports the visual. If there is a visual emphasis in modern science, it is made possible by a set of material practices that are only partly visual. As such, this essay suggests how the history of visual representations in science might be bound up with a history of scientific aurality. (shrink)

ExcerptIn a letter to his friend and intellectual collaborator Theodor W. Adorno, on December 25, 1935, Walter Benjamin describes music as a field of inquiry “fairly remote” from his own.1 Several years later, in another letter to Max Horkheimer, he writes that the “state of musical affairs … could not be any more remote” for him.2 Yet despite these claims of unfamiliarity with aurality, there are numerous observations on acoustic phenomena throughout Benjamin's oeuvre. From his early essays on language to (...) his autobiographical studies and late works on critical historiography, Benjamin displays a keen sensitivity to sound that ranges from…. (shrink)

While the demonstration of crossmodal plasticity is well established in congenital and early blind individuals, great debate still surrounds whether those who acquire blindness later in life can also benefit from such compensatory changes. Yet no proper consensus has been reached despite the fact that a proper understanding of the developmental time course of these changes, and whether their occurrence is limited to - or within - specific time windows, is crucial to our understanding of the crossmodal phenomena. An extensive (...) review of the literature reveals that while the majority of investigations to date have examined the crossmodal plasticity available to late blind individuals in quantitative terms, recent findings rather suggest that this reorganization also likely changes qualitatively compared to what is observed in early blindness. This obviously could have significant repercussions not only for the training and rehabilitation of blind individuals, but for the development of appropriate neuroprostheses designed to aid and potentially restore vision these same individuals. Important parallels will also be drawn with the current state of research on deafness, which is particularly relevant given the recent advances in the development of successful neuroprostheses (e.g. cochlear implants) for providing auditory input into the central nervous system otherwise aurally deafferented. Lastly, this paper will address important inconsistencies across the literature concerning the definition of distinct blind groups based on the age of blindness onset, and propose several alternatives for future investigations. (shrink)